Rick's Daily Tips

Apple users beware: Complete strangers could be listening to your ‘private’ conversations.

Posted on July 31, 2019

If you use an iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch you know how handy Siri can be at times.

But what you might not know is Siri is constantly snooping on your conversations, and that even includes face-to-face conversations that don’t involve a phone call!

What happens is Siri records your conversations for use in training Siri to better understand how you speak and how it should respond to the things you say.

But Siri doesn’t do this “learning” all on it’s own. It has help from human contractors that Apple pays to listen to their customers’ recorded conversations and then provide feedback to help Siri improve.

[Read more…]

Scam alert: 100 million ‘Capital One’ customers affected by massive data breach

Posted on July 30, 2019

Do you have an account with the giant financial services firm Capital One?

If so, there’s a good chance that some very sensitive information about you was recently compromised in a massive data breach.

Yesterday Capital One published this press release detailing the incident.

You can read it for yourself to get all the details, but here are the most important takeaways from it: [Read more…]

Scam alert: Are third-party apps using your Gmail account to send SPAM and malware to other people? Find out right now!

Posted on July 29, 2019

If you use Gmail as your email provider you probably realize how important it is to prevent hackers from accessing your Gmail account.

Once a hacker is logged into your Gmail account he/she can use it to send SPAM and/or malware to other people in your name, via your account. Not good!

What you might not realize is hackers don’t really need to log into your Gmail account directly in order to use it to send SPAM and malware to other people!

[Read more…]

Scam alert: Infections of ‘Password Stealing Malware’ are up 60% so far in 2019!

Posted on July 25, 2019

Security firm Kaspersky (the makers of Kaspersky Antivirus products) has just reported that the number of computers infected with Password Stealing Malware was up 60% during the first half 2019.

The vast majority of those infections involve Azorult, an extremely dangerous trojan-type virus that hackers use to steal a wide variety of user files and personal data (including passwords).

Kaspersky also reported that scans with Kaspersky Antivirus found Password Stealing Malware infections on 25% of all computers that are running the software.

[Read more…]